Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm: Even if you don’t find any diamonds in there, you will have either quieted some of the noisy chaos or greased the writing gears so that you can now face the assigned paper topic. When you find these gems, highlight them or cut and paste them into your draft or onto an “ideas” sheet so you can use them in your paper. Yes, there will be a lot of filler and unusable thoughts but there also will be little gems, discoveries, and insights. When you’re done with your set number of minutes or have reached your page goal, read back over the text. “This paper is supposed to be on the politics of tobacco production but even though I went to all the lectures and read the book I can’t think of what to say and I’ve felt this way for four minutes now and I have 11 minutes left and I wonder if I’ll keep thinking nothing during every minute but I’m not sure if it matters that I am babbling and I don’t know what else to say about this topic and it is rainy today and I never noticed the number of cracks in that wall before and those cracks remind me of the walls in my grandfather’s study and he smoked and he farmed and I wonder why he didn’t farm tobacco…” Your freewriting might even look like this: Word must follow word, no matter the relevance. The crucial point is that you keep on writing even if you believe you are saying nothing. You might do this on the computer or on paper, and you can even try it with your eyes shut or the monitor off, which encourages speed and freedom of thought. When you freewrite you can set a time limit (“I’ll write for 15 minutes!”) and even use a kitchen timer or alarm clock or you can set a space limit (“I’ll write until I fill four full notebook pages, no matter what tries to interrupt me!”) and just write until you reach that goal. The advantage of this technique is that you free up your internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being too self-conscious. If you can’t think of what to say, you write that down-really. You don’t judge the quality of what you write and you don’t worry about style or any surface-level issues, like spelling, grammar, or punctuation. When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down whatever comes into your mind. If the technique you try first doesn’t seem to help you, move right along and try some others. Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on some techniques might suit a particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. What follows are great ideas on how to brainstorm-ideas from professional writers, novice writers, people who would rather avoid writing, and people who spend a lot of time brainstorming about…well, how to brainstorm. In this case, brainstorming forces the mental chaos and random thoughts to rain out onto the page, giving you some concrete words or schemas that you can then arrange according to their logical relations. When you’ve got too much: There are times when you have too much chaos in your brain and need to bring in some conscious order. In this case, brainstorming stirs up the dust, whips some air into our stilled pools of thought, and gets the breeze of inspiration moving again. When you’ve got nothing: You might need a storm to approach when you feel “blank” about the topic, devoid of inspiration, full of anxiety about the topic, or just too tired to craft an orderly outline. Whether you are starting with too much information or not enough, brainstorming can help you to put a new writing task in motion or revive a project that hasn’t reached completion. Below you will find a brief discussion of what brainstorming is, why you might brainstorm, and suggestions for how you might brainstorm. If you consciously take advantage of your natural thinking processes by gathering your brain’s energies into a “storm,” you can transform these energies into written words or diagrams that will lead to lively, vibrant writing. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential. This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing through the challenges of the revising process.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |